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Sounds like a simple enough trade-off. But once you start picking at the edges, you discover a very tangled Web. First, Google's choice may have a plausible ethical rationale. But it is now a publicly owned company, and the decision also stands to earn it truckloads of yuan. China has 111 million Internet users, a number that grew a plump 18% in 2005. Granted, so far few Chinese have credit cards, but when they do, Google's shareholders are going to be peeved if it doesn't host a chunk of the ads that will woo them. And the owners showed their ire last week, not over censorship, but over the crass fact that Google's profit increased a mere 82% in its last quarter. That's not enough for a $433 stock, which became a $381 stock in the days after the announcement. Google may foster a perception that it is beyond the muck of the marketplace, but Wall Street is rapidly getting wise to the less poetic realities of the situation.
Yet it really isn't just about the money. One of the pervasive myths of the information age is that the Internet is a kind of magic spray that when applied to totalitarian states causes democracy to spontaneously blossom forth. "Westerners saw the Internet as this garage-door opener that you could point at closed regimes and open them," says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of the forthcoming book Who Controls the Internet?
The authorities in Beijing have a more realistic take on the power of the Net. They realize that most people aren't going to use it to rally for democracy; they're going to do what Americans do: gossip about celebrities, check the weather, play games and score porn. So the Internet police mostly leave that stuff alone. Wu says the state of the Chinese Internet is even more ominous than total control: "It feels almost normal, so people don't think about what it is they can't get." If anything, the Web has been a galvanizing force for Chinese nationalism. The anti-Japanese riots that broke out last year over a Japanese textbook that underplayed wartime atrocities in China were largely organized online--with government sanction.
And to Google's credit, there are companies that have made far worse bargains in China and haven't got half the public spanking for it. In December the Chinese government took offense at the contents of a blog hosted by Microsoft's MSN service. Microsoft promptly clamped it shut, noting that the company had to obey the law of the land. Earlier last year Beijing investigated a man who used Yahoo! for his e-mail. Yahoo! promptly handed over his computer's IP address. Yahoo! now has one less customer: the man got 10 years for leaking "state secrets."
Moreover, Google's censored version of itself is hardly foolproof. Information is like a toddler: it goes everywhere and gets into everything, and you can't stop it all the time. Chinese doctors were swapping damning e-mails about SARS long before the government would admit there was a problem. Just fooling around with spelling and capitalization can outfox China's online filters, and there's free software available that can give Jingjing and Chacha the slip; Google's free Web Accelerator Tool does that quite nicely.